1993 certainly was an eventful year. Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President of the United States. The Maastricht Treaty took effect, formally establishing the European Union. Nirvana released their last ever studio album before Kurt Cobain's death. Oh, and a game you may have heard of was released, which went by the name of Doom. Everyone knows and (mostly) everyone loves Doom. It did the whole controversy over violent videogames thing five whole years before Grand Theft Auto would surface and take its crown - and while id Software's original corridor based, Nazi-erific death dealer, Wolfenstein 3D, represents the debut of the first person shooter, Doom is truly the game that defined the genre and shot it into what might just be the most popular genre in videogames. [It's also the first truly 3D first person shooter - Wolfenstein used graphical trickery to emulate 3D. Ed].

Doom has landed on Xbox Live Arcade and truth be told, it's bloody awesome! As is the case with the majority of ported XLA games, Doom remains untouched and unchanged, although it's not a port of the original Doom, but rather Ultimate Doom, which added nine extra levels onto the game's original twenty-seven. For those of you who've never played it (and if you haven't, I almost think that you quite frankly don't deserve to call yourself a gamer), Doom sees you taking control of the last survivor of an incident at the Mars facility of the United Aerospace Corporation (UAC), who are experimenting with teleportation between the planet's moons, Phobos and Deimos. However, something goes wrong and hordes of demons pour through the teleportation gates and your friendly neighbourhood space marine must make it out alive. Basically, you run around, press buttons, avoid obstacles and slaughter hundreds of unpleasant demonic monstrosities. And it's great.

Yep, everything from the original is here. First up, the weapons - you start off with nothing but a pistol and knuckledusters, but throughout the game you gradually come across beefier weaponry in the form of a chainsaw, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, plasma rifle and the almighty BFG 9000. And believe me when I tell you that you'll need them, with the amount of unholy personifications of unbridled nastiness you'll encounter. Everything from lowly shotgun wielding zombies to the Cyberdemon, a ten-foot tall horned atrocity with a rocket launcher for an arm, plus everything in between, such as Lost Souls, flying fiery haired heads, and the Arachnotron, a robotic spider that won't hesitate to singe your face with plasma.

Doom can be enjoyed with up to four players. You can all either blast through the single player levels co-operatively, or engage in frenetic deathmatches where the demons take a load off and let the space marines shoot each other to pieces. Tremendously, both co-op and deathmatch can be played in either split-screen or online over Xbox Live, so retro-licious four-player fragging never has to stop - even if your friends are all blind drunk and draped over your sofa and/or curtain rails, or you just had no friends to begin with. Playing in both single and multiplayer also earns you Achievements as you progress, available for fulfilling tasks such as beating levels and/or episodes on specified difficulty settings, finding all the items or a secret area in any level and racking up enough kills in online deathmatches - as is the case with all XLA games, there's a total of 200 points to be gained.

While the gameplay in Doom is still as solid as ever, its shortcomings when compared to today's first person shooters do stick out a little bit at times. The thing that is blindingly obvious is that you cannot look up or down. You're stuck facing directly forward, so while shooting at enemies higher up or lower down than you is still handled by an auto-aiming feature of sorts, it's still a little hard to line up some shots. The only other disappointment is that while playing single player or the split-screen multiplayer modes, the framerate is consistently slick, but when playing over Xbox Live - either co-operatively or competitively - lag can be a serious issue, ranging from tolerable to entirely unplayable. If all players have a spiffy enough Internet connection then all is well and you'll be blasting demons or each other straight back to hell with no problems at all; but be warned, choppy connections will seriously hinder your enjoyment. Doom on XLA from a presentation standpoint is pixelated and old-looking, but that is exactly how it should be. Here it's been upgraded in high-definition, but the textures, character and item sprites and suchlike remain completely untouched. Aurally Doom also still rocks. The music is just as catchy or unnerving in places as long-time fans will remember, plus the gunshots still have a satisfying meatiness to them.

I forgot how much I loved Doom, but the game's re-release reminded me just how much I love it and exactly why. Not many older games hold up as well compared to the newest games on the market as Doom does, which remains fantastic even thirteen years later and no doubt will remain so for another thirteen years. It's one of the most symbolic, enduring and entertaining games of all time and its transition to Xbox Live Arcade is only let down by the occasional lag of online play. Regardless of whether you have any fond memories of this game or you're too young to have played it back in the day, go straight to your Xbox 360 and cough up 800 Microsoft points. You won't be disappointed - and here's hoping for Xbox Live Arcade versions of Doom II and Final Doom as well!

Reviewed by Mark Reece for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).